“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(I felt somewhat better this evening, although I still haven’t recovered fully from the “illness” I began experiencing on October 27. The last session, for November 6, has helped me considerably, and I reread it each morning. I’ve also resumed painting on a daily basis. I planned to resume work on Mass Events this week, but haven’t done so yet. At the moment I paint in the mornings, with an absolute trust growing out of the last session plus what I know and feel about Framework 2, and that’s it. I trust the rest will come. In the meantime I rake leaves in the early afternoon, write letters, and so forth. Right now I feel as far away from Mass Events as I did from painting when I wasn’t doing that.

(As I said to Jane yesterday, now that I’m back painting it seems incredible that I ever left it—even though when I chose to concentrate upon Mass Events this summer I thought that was a good decision also. I still don’t see anything wrong with the decision, but evidently my body—my psyche—rather violently disagreed, considering the beliefs I must carry around with me.

(9:15.) It learns that in a fashion sounds are “stacked” inside the mind before, say, words are spoken. (Pause.) That kind of mental and psychic expansion in one way or another constantly occurs. In conventional art you end up with a product on many such occasions—a book or painting or whatever—as you attempt to define in physical terms the reality of an inner existence with which you have always been familiar, and to leave in physical reality some evidence, however slight, of inner visions that flicker within all consciousness.

(Long pause.) As a child, with no preconceived ideas in normal terms, you drew and wrote stories. Ruburt wrote stories or poems, and drew. The natural impulses were allowed their free play. Later you believed that artists should be artists. The concentration in painting should be so intense—should be—that there would be no thought of any other occupation. The concerns of the world, its progress or lack of it, the nature of existence—none of those issues would interfere with such an artistic vision.

As long as you feel, for example, that there is a conflict between your writing and your painting, then (underlined) you must somehow or other give each an equal-enough play, or you become upset. After your bout (of illness) I therefore suggested you go back to painting—which is important to you, and it is quite true that when you do not paint for a while you feel uneasy, and psychically out of balance. The feeling of competition between the two abilities operates in the other fashion, of course, so that if you have not been writing you feel the same unease.

(Long pause.) You cannot separate the elements of a psyche, approving of some abilities and not others, putting some in competition with others, without experiencing difficulties. The very nature of your painting is, and must be, determined by the quality of your mind, which is inquiring, which refuses to be cramped, which piles questions upon questions, while you think that the artist should ideally ask no questions at all.

If you would try to see your own creative unity, then both your painting and your writing would give greater satisfaction, and become richer—your prose inspired by your imagery, and your painting by your ideas, so that both are sparked, producing not only products but a creative vision that sees reality through an extension that would be the natural art of consciousness, meant to blossom from those abilities.

When you are writing your mind is also playing with images. When you are painting your mind is also building ideas. Forget the old idea of exclusive expression.

You “were” right, then, when you worked on the book before your bout, and during that time you trusted yourself—but then your ideas of the comparative nature of your ideas intruded, triggered at that time by (news of) Crowder’s death, and the ensuing beliefs about the male role in society, and as that applied to your own talents. Left alone, ideally, you might have taken a week of joyful painting, during which time your mind refreshed itself, and new ideas about your notes accumulated. Telling you—or rather suggesting—that you paint simply put you on that course. Do you follow me?